


Lay Me to Rest Beneath the Ravenoak Tree

by JenCforCarolina



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: F/M, oh my actual holy sarenrae i wrote something that is not Destiny
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-04
Updated: 2017-07-04
Packaged: 2018-11-23 04:47:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 395
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11395635
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JenCforCarolina/pseuds/JenCforCarolina
Summary: Love is not eternal, but perhaps they can come close.





	Lay Me to Rest Beneath the Ravenoak Tree

**Author's Note:**

> Some alarmingly close brushes with death lately inspired this.

It’s not druidic tradition, not really. But in Veshra, when someone dies, their body is returned to the earth beneath the Ravenoak tree.

The soul of the tree is in love with the Voice of the Temptest you see. He loves her and her lands and her people. So when a person dies, no matter the cause, she takes up their body if available, and carries it to the roots of the tree.

She digs the grave with a wave of her hand. The ground parts to her will, and she lays the dead to rest, weaves a shelter of roots over their body. If there is no body to give, sometimes trinkets that belonged to the lost are buried. Oftentimes mourners simply kneel to pay respects. 

Keyleth prays.

She knows it offputs many, but she knows something of how Gods work, by now. Knows that praying is little more than thinking with a focus.

All day and night she stays, for hours and hours, until a raven alights at her side. She strokes the bird, gives it food, and watches it peck around the place where the fresh soul is buried. Eventually, it flies off, and she knows the ritual is done.

* * *

The Voice of the Temptest lives beneath the Ravenonak tree, in a hovel crafted from the great gnarled roots, and the trunk itself. It is small and modest inside the heartwood. She likes to be able to feel the tree, no matter what she is doing. She sleeps curled into the wall, sits with her back pressed to it to meditate. Traces fingers up and down the grain hundreds of thousands of times. Sometimes she pressed her forehead to the wall and breathes in time with him, the great deep soul of the Ravenoak tree. 

They do not speak, it is not all of him you see. Just a string, a tether, his last since his twin left this plane to join him, hair finally as white as her love’s, with generations of a family to mourn her. The last silken thread of the Raven Champion’s soul is woven into the tree, nurtured by her hands and his ash and their love for each other. 

She always thought she would outlive him, eventually. But now, she expects they’ll be together a long time. The Voice of the Temptest and her Ravenoak tree.


End file.
